Logging in daily shows you are at least an active member and frob is right in that it does generate a small amount of ad revenue, which helps keep us funded..

Look at anybody with a high rep (frob or brother bob) and you'll see that logging in certainly isn't the reason they have such high reputations. Authors are the ones who are really going to score big in the near future but a series of well-written replies can get enough upvotes to match an article contribution.

Writing an article nets you around 150 rep once peer-reviewed plus +4 for each upvote.

In addition to recognising regular visits -- which are valuable for the reasons outlined above -- +1 for logging in also serves another purpose.

One of the common complaints about previous incarnations of the reputation system was that it was too hard to recover from past mistakes; once your reputation dropped it was VERY difficult to recover. Now there's a simple way to un-do a damaged reputation, simply by visiting regularly.

Another by-product of this is that when someone has a very low reputation they probably really deserve it, as they've obviously been down-voted consistently enough to out-do the daily +1.

If you were really concerned about inflated reputation the place to attack that is upvoting. If you have upvoted 5 posts a day from the start of the new reputation system you now have at least 2190 reputation. 365 from logging in and 1825 from upvotes. At only 3 upvotes a day you still have 1095 + 365 or 1460 reputation which is well above the average.

For instance there are only 40 people over 2300 rep so 5 upvotes a day plus visiting puts you in the top 45 or so without ever getting an upvote yourself.

This is true.. but the real reputation "gold" out there lies in becoming an author. Since my previous post where I mentioned it we now have a case example.. AllEightUp accumulated almost +1000 reputation in about a month.. and the articles being around still will get him more reputation over time. Authorship is the single biggest way to advance quickly in rep. Logging in and upvoting show that you are participating in the community and you can accumulate points over time.. but it just doesn't have the immediate impact that either writing articles or providing helpful posts can have.

I just mean that its silly to complain about log ins when up votes are so much more significant. With 1 log in and 5 upvotes you get 180 rep a month or 1/5th of an article for none of the work though. Also because the rep system is so top heavy there is no need to worry about articles, you hit the top level for nothing. Sure 5-10 people will have 10-20k like hodgman does after a bit, but the next 20 will have so much less that upvoting will be the single most important method of gaining rep. Actually getting an upvote is insignificant compared to giving one, you can't control it and I've often got 10 upvotes and then 6 downvotes on the same post.

In order to balance reputation you need to weigh the cost of getting an upvote vs losing one.

To get an upvote you need to write a post. After writing a post you also have a chance to get a downvote. Alternatively you could get neither. On average if I write 5-10 posts a day and get 1 net upvote I will get 2 more rep from my 5 given upvotes thus meaning I get 2x as much rep logging in and giving out 5 upvotes compared to writing 10 whole posts and getting 1 net upvote.

Writing 5-10 posts takes up to 2 hours of concentrated work. Logging in takes almost no time and reading and giving upvotes takes maybe 10-30 minutes. Assuming I bothered to upvote which I personally rarely do. So it takes 1/4 as much time to get twice as much reputation.

In this case it seems like we should give say, 5 points for getting an upvote. Its still less value for more work but its almost even, close enough. Unless we want to argue that making posts worthy of upvotes is worth more than logging in and giving out upvotes which many people might argue is the case. And then we should raise it even more to meet that criteria.

AllEightUp has 1659 rep. That puts him almost even with my 3 upvotes plus 1 login per day given the 100 base rep.

According to my quick check it appears you get:

15 submit

50 peer review

100 moderator approved

So 165 points per article. You then get a whopping 1 extra rep per upvote over posts. So you need 41 upvotes per article to equal the value of getting it approved in the first place. The average article appears to get 10-15 upvotes. Given that the most active members have already read and made their judgements on each article we can expect perhaps a 4th root tail per year. So with 16 upvotes in the first month we would expect to have 20 upvotes in the first year and then 2-3 more upvotes per following year.

This the value of articles is mostly seen in the first month, even upvote wise, much less the 165 for having it accepted. In fact he got 990 points for the review process. How much has he gotten for upvotes? Doesn't seem like the articles are worth more than the initial 165.

Also how long did he spend writing those articles? If the cost/benefit is too small, they will become only a token boost to reputation over time. And since we can gain 1460 rep a year, by the time 5 years has passed the majority of active members will have over 8000 reputation for just upvoting 3 posts a day. Even if a new user dives in and writes 20 top level articles he will get only 3300 reputation to compare to 100s of members who did nothing but make a minimal number of upvotes a day and log in.

Articles seem like a shit ton of rep now, when 9 articles can accomplish the same as a whole year of slow rep creep, but if the site exists for a longer period, say a decade, articles will barely be of any consequence rep wise.

It probably doesn't matter since reputation systems are garbage anyways, but if we operate on the assumption that they are valuable it does pose a problem.

Most people on the site operate in short bursts rather than slow and steady prolonged periods of time. Those guys are the ones most likely running the site right now to be honest. Articles are +4 per upvote so 15 upvotes is +60 rep but articles have more longevity than forum posts. It may still be unbalanced and need to be skewed more in the favor of authors but so far I'm liking how things are going.

Well as I said the problem will appear over time. Ah well, it doesn't really affect me. Time will tell.

Maybe.. but right now it looks like it's going to be isolated to one or two people.. which I'm totally fine with. If you can consistently spend a year upvoting all sorts of content then good for you and thanks for helping improve the site. =)